5/5/2019 Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit | Tuters | M/C Journal M/C JOURNAL Home > Vol 21, No 3 (2018) > Tuters ARTICLE TOOLS HOME Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit PRINT THIS ARTICLE Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, Daniel Bach CURRENT ISSUE INDEXING METADATA HOW TO CITE ITEM UPCOMING ISSUES Introduction FINDING REFERENCES ARCHIVES On 4 December 2016, a man entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor armed with an AR­15 assault rifle in an attempt to save the victims of an alleged satanic pedophilia ring run by EMAIL THIS ARTICLE CONTRIBUTORS prominent members of the Democratic Party. While the story had already been discredited (LOGIN REQUIRED) (LaCapria), at the time of the incident, nearly half of Trump voters were found to give a ABOUT M/C JOURNAL measure of credence to the same rumors that had apparently inspired the gunman (Frankovic). EMAIL THE AUTHOR Was we will discuss here, the bizarre conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate" had in fact (LOGIN REQUIRED) USER HOME originated a month earlier on 4chan/pol/, a message forum whose very raison d’être is to protest against “political correctness” of the liberal establishment, and which had recently ABOUT THE AUTHORS JOURNAL CONTENT become a hub for “loose coordination” amongst members the insurgent US ‘alt­right’ movement Marc Tuters SEARCH (Hawley 48). Over a period of 25 hours beginning on 3 November 2016, contributors to the /pol/ forum combed through a cache of private e­mails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign https://oilab.eu manager John Podesta, obtained by Russian hackers (Franceschi­Bicchierai) and leaked by University of Amsterdam SEARCH SCOPE Julian Assange (Wikileaks). In this short time period contributors to the forum thus constructed Netherlands All the basic elements of a narrative that would be amplified by a newly formed “right­wing media network”, in which the “repetition, variation, and circulation” of “repeated falsehoods” may be Marc Tuters works an assistant understood as an “important driver towards a ‘post­truth’ world” (Benkler et al). Heavily professor in the New Media and promoted by a new class of right­wing pundits on Twitter (Wendling), the case of Pizzagate Digital Culture program at the prompts us to reconsider the presumed progressive valence of social media protest University of Amsterdam, BROWSE (Zuckerman). as researcher affiliated with the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) BY ISSUE While there is literature, both popular and academic, on earlier protest movements associated and as the director of the Open with 4chan (Stryker; Olson; Coleman; Phillips), there is still a relative paucity of empirical Intelligence Lab (OILab) where his BY AUTHOR research into the newer forms of alt­right collective action that have emerged from 4chan. And current research focusses on how while there have been journalistic exposés tracing the dissemination of the Pizzagate rumors online subcultures constitute themselves as political BY TITLE across social media as well as deconstructing its bizarre narrative (Fisher et al.; Aisch; Robb), movements. as of yet there has been no rigorous analysis of the provenance of this particular story. This CURRENT ISSUE article thus provides an empirical study of how the Pizzagate conspiracy theory developed out of a particular set of collective action techniques that were in turn shaped by the material affordances of 4chan’s most active message board, the notorious and highly offensive /pol/. Emilija Jokubauskaitė University of Amsterdam Grammatised Collective Action Netherlands USER Our empirical approach is partially inspired by the limited data­scientific literature of 4chan (Bernstein et al.; Hine et al.; Zannettou et al.), and combines close and distant reading Daniel Bach USERNAME techniques to study how the technical design of 4chan ‘grammatises’ new forms of collective Aalborg University PASSWORD action. Our coinage of grammatised collective action is based on the notion of “grammars of Denmark action” from the field of critical information studies, which posits the radical idea that REMEMBER ME innovations in computational systems can also be understood as “ontological advances” (Agre 749), insofar as computation tends to break the flux of human activity into discrete elements. By introducing this concept our intent is not to minimise individual agency, but rather to emphasise the ways in which computational systems can be conceptualised in terms of an INFORMATION individ ual­milieu dyad where the “individual carries with it a certain inheritance […] animated by all the potentials that characterise [...] the structure of a physical system” (Simondon 306). FOR READERS Our argument is that grammatisation may be thought to create new kinds of niches, or affordances, for new forms of sociality and, crucially, new forms of collective action — in the FOR AUTHORS case of 4chan/pol/, how anonymity and ephemerality may be thought to afford a kind of post­ truth protest. FOR LIBRARIANS Affordance was initially proposed as a means by which to overcome the dualistic tendency, FONT SIZE inherited from phenomenology, to bracket the subject from its environment. Thus, affordance is a relational concept “equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour” (Gibson 129). While, in the strictly materialist sense affordances are “always there” (Gibson 132), their capacity to shape action depends upon their discovery and exploitation by particular forms of life that are capable of perceiving them. It is axiomatic within ethology that forms of life can be JOURNAL HELP understood to thrive in their own dynamic, yet in some real sense ontologically distinct, lifeworlds (von Uexküll). Departing from this axiom, affordances can thus be defined, somewhat OPEN JOURNAL SYSTEMS confusingly but accurately, as an “invariant combination of variables” (Gibson 134). In the case of new media, the same technological object may afford different actions for specific users — for instance, the uses of an online platform appears differently from the perspective of the individual users, businesses, or a developer (Gillespie). Recent literature within the field of new media has sought to engage with this concept of affordance as the methodological basis for attending to “the specificity of platforms” (Bucher and Helmond 242), for example by focussing on how a platform’s affordances may be used as a "mechanism of governance" (Crawford and Gillespie 411), how they may "foster democratic deliberation" (Halpern and Gibbs 1159), and be implicated in the "production of normativity" (Stanfill 1061). As an anonymous and essentially ephemeral peer­produced image­board, 4chan has a quite simple technical design when compared with the dominant social media platforms discussed in the new media literature on affordances. Paradoxically however in the simplicity of their design 4chan boards may be understood to afford rather complex forms of self­expression and of coordinated action amongst their dedicated users, whom refer to themselves as "anons". It has been noted, for example, that the production of provocative Internet memes on 4chan’s /b/ board — the birthplace of Rickrolling — could be understood as a type of "contested cultural capital", whose “media literate” usage allows anons to demonstrate their in­group status in the absence of any persistent reputational capital (Nissenbaum and Shiffman). In order to appreciate how 4chan grammatises action it is thus useful to study its characteristic affordances, the most notable of which is its renowned anonymity. We should thus begin by noting how the design of the site allows anyone to post anything virtually anonymously so long as comments remain on topic for the given board. Indeed, it was this particular affordance that informed the emergence of the collective identity of the hacktivist group “Anonymous”, some ten years before 4chan became publicly associated with the rise of the alt­right. In addition to anonymity the other affordance that makes 4chan particularly unique is ephemerality. As stated, the design of 4chan is quite straightforward. Anons post comments to ongoing threaded discussions, which start with an original post. Threads with the most recent comments appear first in order at the top of a given board, which result in the previous threads getting pushed down the page. Even in the case of the most popular threads 4chan boards only allow a finite number of comments before threads must be purged. As a result of this design, no matter how popular a discussion might be, once having reached the bump­limit threads expire, moving down the front page onto the second and third page either to be temporarily journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1422 1/6 5/5/2019 Post-Truth Protest: How 4chan Cooked Up the Pizzagate Bullshit | Tuters | M/C Journal catalogued or else to disappear from the site altogether (see Image 1 for how popular threads on /pol/, represented in red, are purged after reaching the bump­limit). 55 minutes all 4chan/pol/ threads and their positions, sampled every 2 minutes (Hagen) Image 1: 55 minutes of all 4chan/pol/ threads and their positions, sampled every 2 minutes (Hagen) Adding to this ephemerality, general discussion on 4chan is also governed by moderators — this in spite of 4chan’s anarchic reputation — who are uniquely empowered with the ability to effectively kill a thread, or a series of threads. Autosaging, one of the possible techniques available to moderators, is usually only exerted in instances when the discussion is deemed as being off­topic or inappropriate. As a result of the combined affordances, discussions can be extremely rapid and intense — in the case of the creation of Pizzagate, this process took 25 hours (see Tokmetzis for an account based on our research). The combination of 4chan’s unique affordances of anonymity and ephemerality brings us to a third factor that is crucial in order to understand how it is that 4chan anons cooked­up the Pizzagate story: the general thread.